Ricardo accelerated carbon and energy (RACE) baseline

Our solution helps you to avoid the high costs and long timelines of more permanent metering solutions, enabling you to quickly and cheaply:

1. create baselines on energy consumption for scope 1 emissions as part of the first step in creating a net zero plan
2. use these consumption insights, alongside our net zero gap analysis tool to define a set of short and long term projects to reach net zero and find energy savings
3. periodically measure and adapt these plans with the flexibility to measure consumption in varied locations
4. efficiently scale these plans across multiple sites, estates

When considering the time it takes to get validated insight(s) on actual energy use, there are two major advantages:

• Shorter time to mobilisation -  we can deploy the monitoring system in the range of days (depending on location), as compared to months for permanent or smart meters.

• Get insights earlier - Once on site our combination of technology and agile approach means that we would aim to provide initial insights within 3 weeks and statistically valid insights within 5 weeks.

This reduces the costs you would incur while waiting to get the insights to act on. Our iterative approach also means that you can then choose priorities based on concrete, validated evidence.

As we've outlined above, reducing the time to insights will reduce the costs. Costs are further reduced due to lower manpower requirements and reduced disruption to operations. Our team will only need the support of two electricians (one main, one safety) for less than two hours that it takes to install, or relocate the meters. These meters can monitor up to 40 circuits using clip-on meters with no system shutdown required, as we have demonstrated on the ZEFI project (more on this below). This is compared to several hours to install each meter and a disruptive planned shutdown of the affected areas.

There are two aspects to reducing energy waste:

• installing capital equipment and
• optimisation of energy systems to suit specific applications.

Installing capital equipment is relatively easy to deliver, but optimising energy systems usually achieves greater reductions in energy waste. Traditionally the optimisation of energy systems has been difficult because getting feedback on results has been slow and getting team buy-in and behavior change is difficult because it relies on the team getting immediate feedback to reinforce behaviours.

Our solution dramatically reduces the time between spotting an opportunity and getting validated feedback on the effect the actions  have taken.

In executing a metering project there is a risk that the meters are not positioned correctly. This risks the value of the insights gained, as the resulting decisions will have been made from incorrect data. This often occurs because people make mistakes or engineering data is wrong, unavailable, or incomplete.

With temporary metering and remote monitoring we can validate the meter positions rapidly and errors can be corrected much more quickly. This was clearly demonstrated at a Scottish islands airport where one meter was manually switched off and we detected and responded within minutes. Equally important is that correcting the mispositioning of a temporary meter can be done within hours. A mispositioned permanent meter will take months to correct, if at all.